The future of data is the future of the enterprise. With the amount of data created, stored and consumed increasing exponentially, hardware and software struggle to keep up.

Those who have to manage and, crucially, understand that data are also presented with many challenges — not least of which is finding the right tools for the job. With each innovation, the choices multiply.

The best place to start is by understanding the landscape, and having a clear idea of expectations. It's too easy to get bogged down in questions of detail and philosophy: whether you should move into the cloud and what should you put there; how to define security, let alone implement it; whether to go for a single vendor solution or mix and match.

All these things are important, but the answers only make sense in the context of what you want to do with your data. This introductory video sets the scene for those decisions, as Steve Ranger, editor of silicon.com, and Rupert Goodwins, editor of ZDNet UK, look at the big issues — and how to start framing the questions that will get you the right answers.